Leo Gallery Shanghai｜Liu Zhengyong: My Mont Sainte-Victoire

In 2012, Liu Zhengyong visited Cézanne's studio. He described it as a simple, secluded farmhouse, with Mont Sainte-Victoire directly opposite—the mountain Cézanne had painted again and again. Liu Zhengyong's studio in Beijing has moved several times before eventually settling in a village on the outskirts of the city. The building was once a small, abandoned grain-processing factory. Not far from the village lie the low foothills, and on a clear day, the distant ridges of the Yanshan Mountains can be seen rising on the horizon. His choice of this place was largely a matter of circumstance and necessity; there are no other artists living nearby. The fact that he is able to remain there in solitude, I suspect, may have something to do with the timely appearance of Cézanne's presence whenever exhaustion and discouragement begin to weigh upon him.

Liu Zhengyong's personal style is rooted in the foundations of Neo-Expressionism. He speaks through paint alone; there is no intervention of mixed media in his work. The human body and the half-length portrait have remained his most enduring subjects. He often places his figures against dark, indistinct backgrounds, using brushstrokes that appear turbulent yet are, in fact, heavy and gritty to articulate the inner states of life. The possible human prototypes from reality undergo repeated transformations and combinations, while color is likewise reconstructed through a deeply subjective process. His figures never possess anything resembling natural skin tones. Instead, their colors are as variegated as a primeval forest or layers of weathered sedimentary rock, with the vivid traces of blood seeming to pulse beneath the surface. In them, we glimpse the will to burn on in the face of despair, the momentary suspension of life amid its passage, and the difficult possibility of rebirth in the wilderness. As the French art critic Hélène de Montgolfier has written: "There is nothing light about these figures; it is as though even their souls have been stripped of all concealment and exposed in their nakedness."

The title of this exhibition, My Mont Sainte-Victoire, is intended to foreground a dimension of Liu Zhengyong's treatment of the body in which nature, landscape, and texture converge. This dimension has been increasingly reinforced in his painting through his travels in Europe and China in recent years. In his studio, he once showed me a video he had filmed on the Pamir Plateau: one mountain range, its folds and contours still fully exposed, had not yet disappeared beyond the horizon, while another, covered in snow, had already entered the field of vision… He called it "the curtain of nature." In his recent monumental paintings, he has begun to translate this image into a correspondence with the human figure, almost as if giving it an anthropomorphic form. By infusing the body with the wildness and elemental force he perceives in nature, he is not only expressing a spiritual reawakening after a long and oppressive period; he is also testing his painting's capacity to make the finite bear the infinite.

Liu Zhengyong's abstract paintings are grounded in the same creative logic, though they place greater emphasis on structure. Through the superimposition of blocks of color, they construct spaces with an architectural quality, resembling a more rational process of building and assembly. When he returns to figuration, these experiences help him establish the structures that sustain the figure and acquire a more solid expressive force. Perhaps, within today's increasingly smooth, saturated, and neutralized aesthetic landscape, Liu Zhengyong has somehow evolved into a kind of "hyper-masculine" presence. Yet his painting is not merely an invitation to relive the fervor and intensity of the art of an earlier era. Rather, it continues to extend, with solitude and resilience, as a dimension of artistic experience that remains profoundly alive.

Text / Zhu Zhu